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In this message here I mentioned that Google was not following the GL URLs for stories.

The person who replied mentioned that it may be the URL length and that led me to do some research on a Google forum I'm a member of.

There is a verified (but anonymous) employee of Google who answers various questions and he said that URLs like http://www.mydomain.com/article.php?story=20031205162055623 would be seen as a session ID by their spider and would not be followedand that a much better alternative would be something like http://www.mydomain.com/article.php?story=182 if you want your site fully indexed.

Any ideas of whether it's possible to shorten the URLs from long numbers that would be seen as session IDs? And how to go about doing it?

Thanks.

This is one BIG think that worries me to death... I don't want to switch over to GL, then have my Google traffic drop off the planet.

Anyone have experience with traffic before/after switching to GL?

That would be helpful.

Well, since my blog was initially Geeklog based, I can't compare with what might have been before, but people do find it in Google.

What I learned as a webmaster is that I should always put the key words (the ones I assume will attract traffic from Google) ONLY in the intro texts and NOT in the body text.

That's because Google only indexes the topics pages and so it does index the intro texts.

It's not perfect though, because when old articles are pushed
into page 2 and forth, Google may still show them as if they are in the main page.

And even if they are still in said page, it's not really user friendly, you see, because the user shouldn't work hard.
He just expects to simply click the Google link and read the article.
Instead, he gets a page full of articles and he has to use the internal browser search to find the the desirable article.

So the best case scenerio is to use the internal search.
The worst case scenerio is to use said site's Geeklog's search engine to find the real page in which page the article resides on.

That being said, Geeklog is still the best free blog manager site helper I've ever seen.
So let's just hope they fix it in the future and make it Google friendly.

Basically, all we want is for Google to index the body texts too and let the users simply get to their chosen articles and nothing else (unless the article is so good they decide to head from there to the main page).

Yep that's my only interest as well.

I wonder if it's even possible to reduce the long URLs. I've looked and have no idea what to look for.

Hoping that some kind soul will have some input.

I've used phpweblog before switching to GL. The url in PHPWeblog was different and, in fact, all the stories was spidered and found using google.
Now, what's happen is that if I search for a word that is in the title of the article, Google found this word and link back to my site but the link is a fake one. I've searched for junkmatcher that's in the title of one article and told Google to search just the italian pages since my site is in Italian. Google has found the word but the link was osxtips.shift.it/2004/index.php?topic=6 that doesn't exist.

Any suggestion?

Just having Google index the main story pages and intro text isn't good enough. Our site has tons of valuable content (gear reviews, stories, etc.) that needs to be indexed. Currently, we get a ton of traffic going to older articles and gear reviews that may or may not be on the main pages.

I'm really in a quandary because I NEED a new content management system and I'm comparing PHP Nuke to GeekLog. Neither of them appear to be search engine friendly, so that scares me to death that I'll loose a ton of traffic.

Considering that I have a ton of links to our storefront, I can't afford to lose those links either. Hmmm...

Check out the Geeklog Devtalk mailing list archives. Specifically,

http://lists.geeklog.net/pipermail/geeklog-devtalk/2004-January/000362.html
http://lists.geeklog.net/pipermail/geeklog-devtalk/2004-January/000363.html
http://lists.geeklog.net/pipermail/geeklog-devtalk/2004-January/000364.html
http://lists.geeklog.net/pipermail/geeklog-devtalk/2004-January/000365.html